


Future Imperfect

by Rakefetzyz



Category: daredevil - Fandom
Genre: Family Issues, Father-Daughter Relationship, Grandparents & Grandchildren, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 03:02:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16864921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rakefetzyz/pseuds/Rakefetzyz
Summary: Matt and Karen's teen daughter wishes she had a more normal family. Her father can always tell if she's lying. And who ever heard of a grandmother being a nun?Hurt/comfort in the sense that I’m hurting because of the cancellation.  I wrote this for comfort.





	Future Imperfect

“Come on, Pegs,” said Emma. “You tell your parents you’re at my place and I’ll tell my mom I’m at yours. Then we'll go meet the guys in the park.” 

“I can’t,” said Peggy, pushing her long blond hair off her face. “My dad can always tell when I’m lying.” 

Emma told her to work on her lying technique. “Your parents aren't even home from the law firm yet. Parents will believe anything if you tell it right .”

“Not my dad,” Peggy answered. “It’s like he has ESP or something.”

Emma laughed. “You make him sound like one of those blind psychics who predicted nine eleven.”

Her father couldn’t actually read minds or predict the future, of course. But if Peggy ever tried to stretch the truth he always knew. 

It started the very first time she could remember trying to lie, when she was about three.

 

* * *

Mommy gave Peggy one cookie from the batch that was cooling on the rack.  


“Don’t take any more. The rest are for later, when Uncle Foggy and Auntie Marci come over.”

But the cookies were so good, chocolate with chocolate chips. Peggy watched and waited until Mommy left the kitchen and helped herself to two more. 

She finished eating them before Mommy and Daddy both came into the kitchen again.

“Peggy! I told you not to touch the rest of the cookies." Mommy’s patience was just beginning to wear thin.

“I didn’t take them,” Peggy lied.

“Now honey, Mommy and Daddy always want you to tell us the truth.”

I am telling the truth,” she insisted. 

“Penelope Margaret Page-Murdock!” Daddy said firmly, “I know when you are lying to me.”

He sounded so certain and stern using her whole long name like that. Peggy gave up and admitted to taking the cookies. 

Any time she tried lying to her parents after that, well, it ended pretty much the same way.

 

* * *

Peggy hoped she had not lost another friend. She sighed to herself as she turned at the corner heading for her building while Emma continued walking straight towards the park. 

Not that there was anything she could do about it. Even if it were possible for her to get away with lying, the boys in the park probably had weed with them. Her mother was always on the lookout for the slightest hint of drugs, ever since Peggy became a teenager two years ago. That’s what happened when your mom was a recovered addict, even if the addiction and recovery both occurred years before you were born.

All Peggy wanted was to fit in with the other high school kids. It seemed so unfair having a family like hers. 

Take her ridiculous name for instance. Page-Murdock wasn’t so bad. Other kids had hyphenated last names. If she chose she could just use the Murdock part and keep it simpler. But her given names were impossible. She was named for her two grandmothers and that meant two long, old fashioned names. Even her nickname, Peggy, was old fashioned. 

 

* * *

When she was little, the story of how she got her name was one of her favorite stories.

“You were named Penelope for my mother, your Grandma Penny,” Mommy explained. “But I still get sad when I think about her getting sick and dying so young. That’s why I didn’t want to call you Penny too.

“Your other name, Margaret, is for Daddy’s mother, Grandma Maggie. But Daddy wanted to save the name Maggie just for Sister Maggie.”

“So you chose Peggy,” the little girl chimed in, “because it sounds a little bit like Penny and a little bit like Maggie.”

“That’s right,” Mommy answered. “It sounds like both the names but it’s your own name just for you.

 

* * *

That was great when she was five or six. Now her name was just one more thing that made people give her funny looks. None of her friends knew of anyone else under the age of sixty who was called Peggy. 

What could she expect, with _her _parents? The other partner in their law and investigations firm actually went around asking people to call him Foggy, for heavens sake!__

____

And while she was thinking about grandparents, why couldn’t she have normal grandparents like the other kids? 

She didn’t mean Grandma Penny, of course. Grandma Penny died of cancer a long time before Peggy was born. It meant that her Mom and soon Peggy herself would need regular medical tests because of the family history. But there was nothing odd about Grandma Penny.

Now Grandma Maggie was a different story. Who ever heard of a grandmother being a nun? 

 

* * *

They were talking about grandparents in her kindergarten class. Emma said her grandma and grandpa lived in Florida. She went to visit them every winter. 

Jackson said his grandma was a scientist who worked for NASA. 

Mia’s grandma was retired and did the old time grandmother things like baking pies and gardening on the roof. 

“My grandma is a nun,” Peggy announced.  


The others burst out laughing. “Grandmas can't be nuns,” said Aiden.

“They can too!” Peggy insisted. “Mine is and she takes care of the kids at Saint Agnes.”

Even the teacher couldn’t suppress a smile. “Maybe you’d better check with your parents again, Peggy, and tell us about your grandmother tomorrow. “

* * *

Grandma Maggie saw them often. When Peggy was little her dad always got a sad, wistful look on his face when Grandma Maggie showered Peggy with love and attention. Later she found out that Grandma Maggie had abandoned him when he was a baby. It seemed so unlike her grandma. But her mother explained that Grandma Maggie had a special kind of sadness after her dad was born, a sadness that wasn’t understood well at the time but that wasn’t her fault. 

Some kids did have divorced or separated grandparents. But no one else had a story as weird as Grandma Maggie's.

Then there was Grandpa Jack, a professional boxer, murdered when Peggy's dad was still just a kid. A boxer might have been exciting but Grandpa Jack didn’t have the best record. There was something suspicious about his murder too that her dad didn’t like to talk about. As if Grandpa Jack had done something to provoke the murderers. 

Grandpa Paxton, her mother's father, lived up in Vermont. Peggy had only seen him three times in her life. He came to New York for a week when she was four and again when she was twelve. In between she and her parents made one short trip to Vermont. Her mother always said she had Peggy to thank for seeing him at all. It took time, but in the end he couldn’t resist meeting his only grandchild. He didn’t have much to do with her mom though. Peggy knew it had something to do with Uncle Kevin’s death, but that was something her mother didn’t like to talk about. 

None of this even came close to how strange her father was. Peggy didn’t even count his blindness, although her friends did find that strange. Some felt sorry for him until they met him and learned how well he managed. To Peggy that was just the way he was. 

But she couldn’t lie to him the way her friends lied to their parents. 

And his nighttime activities were definitely freaky.

 

* * *

As long as Peggy could remember, Daddy did things differently from most people. He read her bedtime stories using his fingers to read patterns of dots that were pasted onto her picture books. Mommy read letters and words like the ones she was learning in preschool, the ones other kids' parents used to read them stories too.

Daddy had a lot of devices that talked to him too, like his alarm clock and his cooking scales. He walked outside using a long cane as through he needed it to feel his way. But in their apartment he always knew where everything was better than she or Mommy did. It didn’t seem strange to Peggy. That was just how he did things.

But if she woke up at night he often wasn’t there. When she woke frightened from a bad dream and went to crawl into her parents' bed, mostly only Mommy was there to calm her and help her sleep again.

As she got older she sometimes woke in the predawn hours to hear her father padding quietly into the apartment. He often had pains all over his body and bruises on his face that he tried to hide behind his red glasses. 

By the time she was nine or ten she figured out exactly what was going on. 

“If other people find out, not only your dad will be in danger. You and I will be in danger, too,” her mother spoke seriously. “Uncle Foggy and Grandma Maggie and a few other people know. We never talk about this with anyone else."

* * *

Of course Peggy always kept her promise of secrecy. But she couldn’t help wishing for a more normal family.

“I would have given my right arm at your age just to have parents who loved me,” her father countered whenever Peggy voiced her complaints.

She acknowledged the truth of his words. She had visited Grandma Maggie at the orphanage and met kids who had no family to take care of them, too.

Peggy's mom and dad were always there for her. She understood that she shouldn't take that for granted. She knew she was lucky to have them.

But sometimes she just couldn’t help wishing to be a normal teenager.

If only her family didn’t have to be so weird!


End file.
